Vol. 80/No. 13 April 4, 2016
NY forum: Shutting down Trump sets back workers
“The working class all over the world is feeling the impact of the capitalist economic crisis,” Kennedy said. “There were a lot of workers at the rally who are fed up with the Democrats and Republicans, who see nothing being done about high unemployment, and who don’t like what the U.S. government is doing in the Middle East.
“We talked about why we need to break from the capitalist parties, emulate the Cuban Revolution and reorganize society to meet the interests of working people. The discussions were a lot like those with my co-workers when I worked in coal mines in Alabama, Colorado, Utah and West Virginia,” noted Kennedy, who is currently on leave from her job at Walmart. “It was a lot of fun.”
“Not everyone at the Trump rally was willing to talk, but most were,” she said. “One young woman said she didn’t agree that fast-food workers should get $15 an hour, saying ‘shouldn’t we be creating good jobs?’ I said yes, we need to fight for a federally funded public works program and for a union,” Kennedy said. “At the same time wages are set from the bottom up, not the top down.”
These discussions, she said, highlight why those who organized to prevent Trump from speaking did a grave disservice to the young people who joined them, mistakenly believing this advances the fight against attacks on immigrants, police brutality and anti-Muslim discrimination.
A capitalist politician, not a fascist
“Trump’s not a fascist, he’s a demagogic bourgeois politician,” said Naomi Craine, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party here, who spoke along with Kennedy. “He uses crude anti-Mexican and anti-Muslim rhetoric, and there’s a real edge to his comments on women.”What he proposes to do is not much different from the other capitalist politicians, however. The U.S. government should build a wall on the Mexican border, Trump says. In fact there already is a wall, much of it built during the administration of President Bill Clinton. Trump talks about keeping out Muslims “temporarily,” but the current administration “has already been denying visas to many Muslims,” Craine noted.
Yet virtually every petty-bourgeois radical group in the United States that calls itself socialist backed the March 11 attack on free speech and the right to assembly, under the guise of stopping the “fascist” Trump. Among the main organizers of the disruption was Moveon.org, which functions as a wing of the Democratic Party, and there was prominent participation from the Workers World Party, the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the International Socialist Organization.
A false view of working class
All these groups write off workers who are Caucasian, slandering them as reactionary, nativist and racist.“For oppressed people, confronting Trump and his fascistic movement is a matter of basic self-defense,” wrote the Party for Socialism and Liberation on their website.
Workers World boasted that “sections of the protest were able to block the parking garage that Trump supporters were vacating. … Their bigotry and white supremacist rhetoric are not welcome in Chicago.”
Peoples World, a website of the Communist Party USA, echoes this view of pro-Trump workers as backward and nativist. “Americans are cash-strapped and fearful,” the site says. “They’re looking for someone to blame.”
Yet even the New York Times, which has abandoned almost any pretense of writing objectively about his campaign, has had to admit that what is fueling interest in Trump is not his anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric, but his claim to be the one who can do something about the economic crisis.
In a March 19 article, the Times interviews workers from Carrier, an air conditioner company that recently announced it is closing its Indianapolis factory and moving production to Mexico. Trump denounced the closing, as part of his America First nationalist opposition to “free trade” pacts.
Marke Weddle, 55, who has worked at Carrier for 24 years, told the Times he disagrees with Trump’s anti-immigrant stance. But when it comes to Carrier, “now they’re going to throw us under the bus? If Trump will kick Carrier’s ass, then I’ll vote for him.”
The International Socialist Organization portrays the call to shut down Trump as somehow a defense of free speech. “The protesters in Chicago didn’t ask the state to interfere by the restricting of his speech,” the group says on their website. “Instead we drowned out his hate ourselves.”
All this does is make Trump look like he’s a defender of free speech. “History has shown that attacks on political expression always end up being used against the rights of the working class,” Craine said.
“Many workers don’t like it when someone tries to tell you what you can think and who you can listen to,” said Long Island Rail Road worker Craig Honts during the discussion period. “At some rail yards views on Trump are really polarized and become frozen. That’s why the Socialist Workers Party campaign statement on the need to defend free speech is so useful — to open up the discussion we need on what way forward for working people.”
Related articles:
SWP: Workers need to organize independent of bosses’ parties
US out of Guantánamo! End Cuba embargo now!
Socialist Workers Party campaign statement
SWP 2016 candidates
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